Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Science is not an occupation of the elite in isolated ivory towers but an endeavor that benefits and excites all humans, irrespective of their academic backgrounds.

Some of the resistance to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence boils down to conservatism, which many scientists adopt in order to minimize the number of mistakes they make during their careers. This is the path of least resistance, and it works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more fun

Surrounded by the technological comforts of the twenty-first century, scientists imagine ourselves the descendants of Galileo rather than the descendants of the men (it was entirely men) who muzzled him. But that is an error akin to a scientist cherry-picking data. Our civilization is the product of not just our scientific advances but also those m

Very often, what sets an astrophysicist’s detective story in motion is the discovery of an anomaly in experimental or observational data, a piece of evidence that does not follow our expectations and that cannot be explained by what we know. In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule the

What stands in our way of the fair consideration of ‘Oumuamua being of extraterrestrial design isn’t the evidence or the method of its collection or the reasoning behind the hypothesis. What most immediately stands in our way is a reluctance to look past the evidence and reasoning at what should follow. Sometimes the problem lies with the message,

The data we confront tells us that ‘Oumuamua was a luminous, thin disk at the LSR, and when it encountered the gravitational pull of the Sun, it deviated from a trajectory explicable by gravity alone, and it did so without visible outgassing or disintegration. These data points can be summed up as follows: ‘Oumuamua was statistically a wild outlier

Today, a young theoretical astrophysicist is more likely to get a tenure-track job by pondering multiverses than by seeking evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is a shame, especially because budding scientists are often at their most imaginative during the early phases of their careers. During this fertile period, they encounter a profe

Long before I confronted the evidence presented by ‘Oumuamua, I had learned that across all facets of life, taking the evidence presented to you and pursuing it with wonder, humility, and determination can change everything—if, that is, you are open to the possibilities contained in the data.

This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio—or its width to its height—than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen.

Adding all other galaxies in the observable volume of the universe increases the number of habitable planets to a zetta, or 1021—a figure greater than the number of grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth.